Threatened Masculinities and Women’s Exclusion in Israeli Soccer

Mizrahi masculinity under threat

Following the wave of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s, Israel emerged as an ethnically stratified society, in which Palestinian citizens were relegated to the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy, with the population of the middle and upper classes largely comprised of Jews from European origin (Ashkenazim); Jews from Arab and Muslim countries (Mizrahim) are an intermediate group between the Ashkenazim and the Arab citizens.¹ Although the boundaries between Ashkenzim and Mizrahim are much more diffused and blurred than the boundaries between Arabs and Jews, division within the Jewish population is a crucial factor in Israeli political dynamics.

Like Palestinian citizens (although to a lesser extent), Mizrahi men have suffered from a high rate of unemployment and occupy the least prestigious and lowest-paid occupations. A combination of structural discrimination and perceptions of cultural inferiority have pushed many Mizrahim into dependency on the state institutions. These developments were especially detrimental to Mizrahi fatherhood and were expressed in yearning for an image of a powerful Mizrahi masculinity.² In addition, the Israeli army, where hegemonic ideals of Zionist masculinities were displayed, reproduced the ethnic stratification in civil life, with the Mizrahim underrepresented in higher ranks (although to a lesser extent in the last two decades) and in the more prestigious units and positions, such as the infantry “special” units and combat pilots.³

The 1970s, a decade of turbulent Mizrahi activism, was accompanied by the success of soccer teams that were followed mainly by Mizrahi fans and by the growing visibility of Mizrahi soccer stars. As members of the working class of emerging Israeli society, Mizrahi men gradually became the dominant group among Israeli soccer players. Many of them saw it as an “education by-passing” channel for mobility, though a systematic examination of this assertion has proven that it was mainly an illusion.⁴ The two championships won by Ha-Po’el Be’er Sheva (a team which represented Be’er Sheva, a southern city populated by a Mizrahi majority) in 1974 and 1975 and Beitar Jerusalem’s win of the state cup in 1976 and 1979 were seen by many of their fans as a successful Mizrahi protest and were compatible with the emergence of the image of a strong Mizrahimi man. Soccer stars like Gideon Damti, Shalom Avitan, and Eli Ohana provided a successful model of Mizrahi masculinity.

Soccer stadiums in Jewish localities thus gradually became spaces dominated by the Mizrahi working class. The particular class and ethnic character of Israeli soccer is evident in municipal authorities’ support for the sport. In an analysis of support for these clubs in Israel in 1998, I found a positive and statistically significant correlation (0.58) between financial support for soccer clubs and the relative share of inhabitants whose continent of origin is Asia or Africa. Similarly, there was a negative and statistically significant correlation (-0.65) between the municipal support for soccer clubs and the relative share of inhabitants whose continent of origin is Asia or Afirca. Namely, soccer has had great importance in predominantly Mizrahi towns.⁵

Mizrahi men have found themselves, however, in a sensitive position. Since Arabs were the ultimate enemies of Zionism, a powerful hegemonic ideology, many of the Mizrahim have made extra efforts to efface any traces of their Arab cultural identity and appearance. Obtaining privileges and acceptance as legitimate Israelis has been conditioned on their ability to make clear distinction between themselves and the Arabs. Additionally, during the first decades of the state’s existence, Arab Palestinian and Mizrahi Jews competed for the same low-paid jobs, a competition which was much less familiar to Ashkenazi middle class men. These two factors have created a particularly tense relationship between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians, despite their relative cultural proximity.

Learning that they share a major pastime in the soccer stadium with Arab men was an unpleasant discovery for Mizrahi fans, especially given the growing success and visibility of Arab soccer. Hence, the most charged encounters of Arab and Jewish fans in the soccer stadium have happened when Arab teams have met teams with a strong Mizrahi identity, like Beitar Jerusalem, Bnei Yehuda, Sport Club Ashdod, and Ha-Poel Be’er Sheva. Beitar, incidentally, is the only team in the Israeli first division that has never included an Arab player on its roster, and a non-Arab Muslim player from Nigeria who joined the team in 2004 left it the middle of the season under pressure from fans.

After Beitar was defeated 4 to 1 by Sakhnin in Jerusalem on October 4, 2004, Beitar fans published a video clip on the web which included the goals from the game and was preceded by the words: “Yesterday was the most painful, humiliating and embarrassing day in the history of our club since it was founded in 1936 . . . This day was inscribed in the history books as a day of mourning”. Being defeated by Arab men was understood as an extreme form of humiliation. The tight link between the need to reaffirm their Jewishness, to de-orientalize their image, and to fortify their normative sense of masculinity is reflected by the frequent combinations of ethno-religious insults and the questioning of the heterosexuality of their opponents. “Muhammad is gay!” for example, is a popular cry used by Beitar fans against Sakhnin.

The homophobic discourse is especially relevant to this discussion as it is an important indicator of the level of threat to the fans’ masculinity. Homophobia can be interpreted as an expression of the fear of men that other men would detect their insufficient masculinity.⁶ A recent experiment in social psychology confirmed that men who receive messages which threaten their masculinity express a greater level of homophobia compared with other men.⁷ The frequent homophobic remarks of sport fans should be understood in this context. As Raz Yosef argues, the Mizrahi protest in Israel since the 1970s has been highly influenced by the humiliation of the Mizrahi father, which has frequently included the imagining of Mizrahi men as sexually subjugated to Ashkenazi men.⁸ Therefore, while this protest strove to undermine Ashkenazi hegemony, it attempted to reestablish the patriarchal status of Mizrahi men and included elements that were oppressive toward women and homosexuals.

While teasing the opponent team by ascribing homosexuality is very common among soccer fans, in Israel this “accusation” is most frequently directed toward the soccer team of Ha-Po’el Tel Aviv by other Jewish teams. In the website forum of Beitar Jerusalem’s fans, for example, whenever Ha-Po’el Tel Aviv is mentioned, its name immediately evokes the adjectives “Arab,” “Ashkenazi,” “non-Jew,” and “gay.”

Not only does Ha-Po’el Tel Aviv have a long tradition of including Arab players but it was also the flagship of the old Mapai Ashkenazi establishment, who ruled the country until 1977 and whose policies significantly contributed to the inferior positioning of Mizrahim within the socio-economic hierarchy. Therefore, the team has an Ashkenazi and establishment-oriented image in the eyes of other teams’ fans.

The picture on the left reflects the connection between threatened masculinities and the construction of ethnicity within the Israeli soccer sphere. It appeared on the website of Ha-Po’el Be’er Sheva, a team with a firm Mizrahi majority among its fans. It embodies an attempt to humiliate Ha-Po’el Tel Aviv’s fans by superimposing two flags on their club’s emblem: the flag of the Palestinian Authority and the flag of the gay community (which considers Tel Aviv to be its “capital”).

The combination of a questioning of the national loyalty of

opponents and a questioning of their masculinity (homosexuality as evidence of impaired masculinity) is related to the anxiety of Mizrahi soccer fans about their masculinity, as well as their public (mis)identification as Arabs. As a matter of fact, Ha-Po’el Tel Aviv fans are ethnically and politically heterogeneous, and obviously there is no evidence that their sexual orientation is different from fans of other teams. However, soccer cultures tend to easily construct a series of dichotomous contrasts.

For example, after violent clashes between fans of Ha-Po’el Tel Aviv and Bnei Yehuda, a team that represents a poor Mizrahi neighborhood in Tel Aviv, a fan of Bnei Yehuda told the local newspaper: “Ha-Po’el fans are unbearable. They have always been the elites, dandies, as if they are Europeans. They have this patronizing shape. They would always tell you in the face that their way is the right way, that white is the nice color. They are left wing and we are right wing, they are rich and we are poor, they are the successful and we are the loser, they are the beautiful and we are the ugly.” The dandyism of Ha-Poel Tel Aviv is presented by the fan as one element in a whole set of ethnic-class-political identity, which is implicitly opposed to the rough masculinity of Mizrahi working class men. As if to emphasize the ethnic basis of the animosity to the “dandies,” when the same fan was asked if he would have thrown stones on Beitar Jerusalem’s fans he said: “Are you out of your mind? Beitar is our big sister – you don’t hit family members.”⁹

1. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, “Citizenship and Stratification in an Ethnic Democracy,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 3 (1998): 408-27. [↩]
2. Yosef, “Homoland.”  [↩]
3. Orna, Sasson-Levy, “Military, Masculinity, and Citizenship: Tensions and Contradictions in the Experience of Blue-Collar Soldiers,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10, no. 3 (2003): 319-345. [↩]
4. Moshe Semyonov, “Occupational Mobility through Sport: The Case of Israeli Soccer,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 21, no. 1 (1986): 23-33. [↩]
5. For details about the data and calculations, see my forthcoming book, Arab soccer in a Jewish State, Cambridge University Press, 2007, Appendix 5. [↩]
6. Gendered Society Reader, ed. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). [↩]
7. Robb Willer, “Overdoing Gender” (lecture, annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA, 2005). [↩]
8. Yosef, “Homoland.” [↩]
9. Iton Tel Aviv, October 25, 2002. [↩]